Presentation: “Quantum” Performance Effects: Beyond The Core

CPU microarchitecture is hidden from developers by compilers, virtual machines, etc. Should developers know everything about CPU microarchitecture? It looks like learning quantum mechanics for cooking. Recently we heard how some microarchitecture features could lead to security breaches like Spectre/Meltdown. In this session, we won't talk about vulnerabilities. We will talk how (and how big) CPU microarchitecture details may have an influence on applications performance. Could it be visible by end-users? How to avoid misjudgment when we estimate our code performance? CPU is huge (not in size) that is why the talk is limited to those parts which located out of computational core (mostly caches and memory access).